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A recent story that was covered heavily by the conservative media but not covered by the regular media at all was the leaked transcripts from a New York Times employee town hall in which the executive editor of the Times, Dean Baquet, laid out how the Times set the narrative for news coverage in the country by orienting their news room to go full Russian Collusion. It was great fun for a while…

“We set ourselves up to cover that story. I’m going to say it. We won two Pulitzer Prizes covering that story. And I think we covered that story better than anybody else.”

Winning two Pulitzers for fake news is nothing I would brag about, but then, I don’t work at the Times.

“But then came the Mueller report, with special counsel Robert Mueller failing to establish that the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with Russia to fix the 2016 election. “The day Bob Mueller walked off that witness stand, two things happened,” Baquet continued. “Our readers who want Donald Trump to go away suddenly thought, ‘Holy shit, Bob Mueller is not going to do it.’ And Donald Trump got a little emboldened politically, I think. Because, you know, for obvious reasons. And I think that the story changed. A lot of the stuff we’re talking about started to emerge like six or seven weeks ago. We’re a little tiny bit flat-footed. I mean, that’s what happens when a story looks a certain way for two years. Right?””

So when your narrative collapses, what to do?

Now, Baquet continued, “I think that we’ve got to change.” The Times must “write more deeply about the country, race, and other divisions.”

The headline controversy, it appears, was a preview of a new 2019-2020 New York Times. If Baquet follows through, the paper will spend the next two years, which just happens to be the run-up to the 2020 presidential election, building the Trump-is-a-racist narrative. (Baquet added, almost as an afterthought, that the Times will “continu[e] to cover his policies.”)

That the Times is, rather than reporting news, setting up narratives, is no surprise to most people on the right. I didn’t bother to write anything about it because, hey, it’s business as usual. What isn’t business as usual is that this time the Never Trumpers are helping out. Last week there were two Never Trump articles published that were pushed by MSNBC.

“Conservatives ought to make it a priority to fight for the fundamental dignity and equality of racial minorities who have been denied that dignity and equality. It will require overcoming decades of injustice, and so won’t happen quickly. We won’t disabuse the Left of their self-satisfied smears and conceits, but that’s not the point. Conservatives will be able to take solace in the fact that we’re fighting the good fight and pissing off the racists.”

Although “pissing off racists” is all well and good, even Carney admits, “we won’t disabuse the Left of their self-satisfied smears and conceits.” So you can fight the good fight, join with the left to call conservatives racist, and then…what? Get called racist yourself for your troubles?

Of course it’s not often that MSNBC devotes a segment to a Washington Examiner article, but Morning Joe did just that. If you have the time, you should watch it.

And once again, Morning Joe dedicated a whole segment to David French’s hysteria against a segment of the population that is an internet only phenomenon, and is so tiny it doesn’t show up in polling. Again, I recommend a watch, if only to catch French’s hysteria.

Not only are Carney and French helping The New York Times waste another two years of coverage on their 1619 Project rather than actually reporting news, it’s all going to turned against Republicans, which of course is Carney and French’s goal too. Any party that would reject Evan McMullin as a serious candidate must be burned to the ground, and what better way to do it in 21st Century America than with the torch of racism?

I came across an interesting twitter thread the other day which posited an interesting question.

It’s an interesting question, as a pure theoretical, but my short answer is no way.

The US and the UK are too dissimilar to form a cohesive union. The almost 250 year separation has led to totally different economic, political, and national cultures. The UK couldn’t tolerate either a First or Second Amendment; both are alien concepts in their political culture, and there are no doubt many other aspects of our political culture that the UK would simply find intolerable.

The US doesn’t need any more States (I’m looking at you Puerto Rico!) The trend of a few massive super states, the condition we found ourselves at the beginning of the 20th Century, has reversed itself, usually after each war. The Ottoman Empire, the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia and decolonization have left a multitude of nation states (and chaos) as a result. That process is still going on. Scotland, Catalonia, and a multitude of others want to be independent countries, and of course here in the US, we have California…

That being said, in a post Brexit Britain, we should seek closer economic ties. President Trump has proposed a trade agreement with the UK and that will probably be an economic necessity for the British economy after leaving the EU. I would suggest going further with a common market among the Anglosphere nations, the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the UK. This isn’t just my daydreaming, but a serious proposal. None other than the current British Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, has endorsed that as a goal.

An Anglosphere common market and relatively easy movement would be more than an economic match for the EU and China. It has a lot of the benefits of freer trade without the downsides that the US has fallen into by seeking trade agreements with third world countries that serve as large “sucking sounds” of US manufacturing to take advantage of third world wage rates. The economies and wage rates of the Anglosphere countries are more or less equivalent, meaning competition will depend on more than who can pay their shoeless employees even less money.

I’m no isolationist, but isolationism is a better alternative than the course the US has been following for the last 30 years; a race to the bottom for wages and the deindustrialization of the American heartland. An Anglosphere alternative would help provide a better alternative, larger markets among equivalent national economies. Will it happen? I wouldn’t bet on it but there is a better alternative than the one we’ve been on for the past few decades.

In an age in which no matter what Trump says or does, Democrats feel duty bound to do the opposite, Democrats are now the biggest supporters of “free trade” and are siding with China against the United States in our trade dispute with China. So it’s no surprise that both China and the Democratic candidates must have felt like they achieved some sort of victory when Trump backed down on his threatened China tariffs and postponed them until December.

Online I find numerous posts about how Trump doesn’t know what he’s doing and his trade policy is a disaster, and it does seem uneven, but my sincere question of “what’s the alternative?” go unanswered. And for good reason; there are no Democratic talking points on dealing with China other than restoring the pre-Trump status quo, in which China had a free hand to do whatever they wanted, and some vague mutterings about the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP). So rather than have a China policy, Democrats have a China reflex; if Trump wants it, they’re against it.

US China policy is a great example of how rule by experts has brought us to the brink of disaster. In the 1990’s, every pipe smoking academic, State Department East Asia expert, and think tank economist was preaching the gospel of turning China from a poor communist dictatorship into a rich beacon of democracy, all through the magic of trade. For example (from 2000):

“China expert Michael Oksenberg of the Asia-Pacific Research Center at Stanford University believes, nevertheless, that over the long run the trade deal will help make China a more “humanely governed” land.”

How did that work out? Is China more “humanely governed” than it was 20 years ago?

So the Clinton administration pushed, and Congress finally approved, granting “Most Favored Nation” status in the World Trade Organization (WTO). However to be fair, this wasn’t just the Clinton administration supporting this; there was a bipartisan push for this. Republicans and Democrats alike supported China’s entry in the WTO.

Normalizing trade relations with China counts as one of the major strategic blunders of the United States has committed. We actually helped create not just an economic giant but a military power that threatens the US interests in the Pacific region. China’s goal is to become the world’s “number one power,” displacing the United States, and we helped get them on their way.

So what do the Democrats suggest?

Nothing really except they oppose tariffs on China. American Greatness detailed, Kamala Harris, Steve Bullock, and Beto O’Rourke all criticized tariffs on China all while the US was trying to engage in negotiations with China. Lefty journalist Peter Beinart observed:

“Bernie Sanders says nothing about China on his website. Neither do Elizabeth Warren, Pete Buttigieg, Beto O’Rourke, Cory Booker, or Kirsten Gillibrand. All Joe Biden says about China on his website is that it’s “rising.” On hers, Amy Klobuchar pledges to “invest in diplomacy and rebuild the State Department and modernize our military to stay one step ahead of China.” Kamala Harris’s website says the United States should “work in lockstep with our partners” to confront “China’s unfair trade practices.” That’s about as substantive as it gets.”

Of course the rust belt edge that Trump gained over Hillary was all about China. I think a nation that has engaged in unfair trade practices since we’ve started trading with them, has engaged in intellectual property theft on the order of $225 billion to $600 billion annually, requires joint ventures in order to control any company that invests in China, and has vowed to replace us as the world’s leading power should be taken seriously as a threat.

Meanwhile the Democrats are resorting to their old habits from the cold war as viewing a Republican President as a greater threat than the Soviet Union and now China. The Democrats might wise up some day, but my guess is it won’t be soon and will be way to late when they do.

The New York Times gives away the game yet again in another opinion piece on demography, liberal Democrats style. I didn’t find this until after the string of mass shootings of the past week, so it probably reads a bit different to me than was originally intended.

“In every presidential election for the past 50 years, a majority of white voters have voted against the Democratic nominee, and the overwhelming majority of people of color have sided with the Democrats.”

This is the major political divide in the US, and has been for a long time. Good luck trying to get this clarity on TV news, but on print in the Times, it probably feels like a safe space, with no one not in the club listening.

“What we learned in the 2016 election is that 37 percent of the white vote is enough to win the popular vote by nearly three million people. Obviously something went wrong in three critical states — Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania — where Mr. Trump prevailed by nearly 80,000 votes, tipping the Electoral College in his favor.”

Despite the overwhelming Electoral College victory Trump enjoyed, it was hanging by a hair, and that will be doubly true in 2020.

“Mrs. Clinton came exceedingly close to winning those states. Had she secured just 0.5 percent more of the white vote, she would be president.

…The number of voters who stayed home in 2016 in Detroit, Milwaukee and Philadelphia was far larger than the margin of Democratic defeat in those states.”

This matches my conclusions from the result of the 2018 Midterms. Democrats have finally cracked the code on midterm turnout, and a turn out increase during a Presidential election year could yield big wins for Democrats.

“As people of color become a bigger portion of the voting population, the number of white votes required to win steadily shrinks. In fact, a group of think tanks released a report last year showing that if all of the country’s racial groups replicate in 2020 their voter turnout and partisan preferences of 2016 — essentially a “do-over” — the Democrats would win Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, just because of the demographic changes over the past four years.”

Did someone just say, “Demography is Destiny?”

“America is getting browner by the hour, given that every single day, as of 2016 data, the United States population increases by 8,000 people and 90 percent of that growth comes from people of color. Moreover, an additional seven million teenagers of color will have turned 18 since the 2016 election. With this demographic revolution transforming the country, Democrats do not actually have to increase their level of white support — they just need to hold it steady, as the core of whites who vote Democratic have done for 40 years.”

I find myself in complete agreement with these conclusions. All things being equal, Democrats win just letting things continue as they have. It’s a bit amusing that this New York Times piece basically agrees with the El Paso shooter’s manifesto. That’s why I’ve found no comfort in the full measure of insanity that the Democratic Party has embraced. They’ve gone so far left so quickly, that Biden and Pelosi, liberals their entire political lives now find themselves “moderates.” But none of that really matters in modern day America.

The real question is can the GOP increase their percentage of the white vote to counter this? My obvious answer is no, since the establishment GOP doesn’t even accept this analysis. They still think tax cuts and political positions matter. Trump’s policy positions did matter to the 80,000 votes won in three States in 2016, but those people will likely be drowned out by the rising tide of identity politics voting. That’s why I think Trump’s chances of winning, even with the benefit of being an incumbent, are slim, and are shrinking as the author of that piece says, “every single day .“

Last night’s Democratic debate yielded little real news, other than my surprise that the party actual still has some moderates. Former Congressman John Delaney made a play for moderates in the party, gambling that much of the party hasn’t yet gone off of the “Squad” deep end. Based on the latest post-debate polling however, Delaney is still down around 1%. Who is up and who’s down in these early Democratic debates will mean almost nothing in the long run of course. Of far greater import, and a story that may bob up and down for years, is the article veteran national defense reporter Bill Gertz posted yesterday at The Washington Free Beacon.

China is conducting an aggressive disinformation and influence campaign designed to block the re-election of President Trump in 2020, according to a dissident Chinese billionaire who until recently was close to senior Beijing leaders.

Guo Wengui, an exiled Chinese real estate tycoon-turned-anti-communist critic, said in an interview that details of the influence operation were disclosed recently by Chinese Vice President Wang Qishan in Beijing.

The campaign has been underway since the 2018 mid-term election and involves enlisting pro-China elements inside the United States to end the Trump administration after four years.

This actually makes sense. Can you name a President who has been more of a thorn in the side of the Chinese leadership since the Korean War? It has to be Donald Trump. China is facing an economic slowdown due partially to Trump’s trade tactics, and if the Chinese leadership could choose the US leadership (which they are apparently trying to do) they would anoint China friendly Joe Biden in a heartbeat.

“For the 2020 U.S. presidential election, the security committee has given very clear instructions that it is not permissible for Trump to win the 2020 election,” Guo said speaking through an interpreter.

By deploying its intelligence and influence resources in the United States, the CCP is working to exploit the harsh political divisions between Democrats and Republicans in seeking to unseat the Trump administration.

“President Trump has already caused a lot of damage to the CCP, so they have declared he will not be allowed to have another four years in power,” the dissident said.

And how is China going to interfere?

Regarding Wang’s disclosure, the Chinese vice president reportedly said China plans on using “four weapons” to derail Trump’s re-election.

“I must tell you that you that you need to heed these four weapons because they pose a very real threat,” Guo said.

The first weapon to be used against Trump is the use Wall Street financial leaders.

The second political weapon in the anti-Trump campaign are those political leaders and lobbyists in Washington who can be enlisted to oppose Trump. “There are quite a few of these individuals who have been corrupted by the CCP for many years … and so they will be the No. 2 weapon,” Guo said.

American mainstream news and social media outlets, many of which have been shown to be hostile toward Trump, are a third tool in the Chinese campaign.

A fourth line of attack is China’s effort to co-opt the overseas Chinese and Asian-Americans, groups that have grown in political power through increased wealth and subsequent political donations and voting power.

At this point the third political tool to fight Trump seems the most interesting. Would a mass media that’s spent the last two and a half years in hysterics over election interference gleefully cooperate with the Chinese to help them sabotage a US election to defeat Donald Trump?

Back in the days of my youth, there used to be a fairly popular saying among the Archie Bunker class, “America, Love it or Leave it!” It was generally directed against anti-war types, hippies, and meatheads of various sorts, including recent immigrants who decided to make it a personal mission to bitch about every aspect of their new home. Clearly there is no actual place to exile native born American citizens, although I’ve long suggested a plan to offer to buy out their American residency and send them on their way. Even at a price of a couple of hundred thousand dollars per miscreant, it would be money well spent to reduce the general annoyance level of the country.

These fond remembrances came back to me after President Trump’s recent tweet to “The Squad,” The Democratic House’s Scooby gang of meatheads, Reps. Ocasio-Cortez, Omar, Pressley, and Tlaib.

I had written about Ilhan Omar before since I regard her as the most dangerous one of the quartet. Pressley, I hadn’t even known was part of this little Legion of Doom until Trump started tweeting about the Squad. AOC on the other hand, is, on balance a net plus for the GOP. Her goofy statements provide lots of clicks on right leaning websites and her ability to push the entire Democratic Party to the left, tweet by tweet, helps make the entire party look like crazy town. Of course, that’s a double edged sword. I seem to recall someone else who rode their twitter account all the way to the White House…

Since there is a media consensus that Trump’s tweets are racist, there is no point in trying to contradict that. They decide, you shut up and take it. Of course, to me, the issue wasn’t about race at all, merely the ignorance of telling native born American citizens to go back to their country. If he had just directed it Omar, it would have been an accurate tweet. And frankly, I wish Omar would go back to her country.

To the left/Democrats/mainstream media however, any insult directed to a “person of color” is racist simply based on the color of the person the insult is directed to, not the actual content of the insult. A racial insult can now be race free!

Ah, progress…

By that ridiculous standard, that makes Trump’s tweet against Pressley and Omar “racist” since after all, they’re Black. But with Tlaib and Ocasio-Cortez, it’s a bit more complicated. Rashida Tlaib is Palestinian, which according to the US Census makes her White. Ocasio-Cortez is Puerto Rican, and claims mixed ancestry, but who’s to know? It’s unlikely she’ll be as dumb as Elizabeth Warren and submit to a DNA test. Just going by the eyeball test though, if her last name were Italian, French, or Greek we wouldn’t even be having this conversation. There is no paper bag test applied to people claiming to be “people of color.” If it were, you would need to be at least this brown to ride this ride:

Person of Color Test

Instead, we have this term, People of Color, who’s purpose seems to be to separate everyone in the world from a couple of hundred million White people. In fact, quite a few Caucasians seem to qualify as people of color not by virtue of race or skin tone, but by some sort of amorphous layer of oppression. You can even be a European from Spain or Portugal, where you are considered white, but once in the US, you would magically become, “a person of color.”

In popularizing that term, someone, somewhere, thought it would be useful to have a term that separated the rest of humanity from a certain type of white people. There are human beings (the People of Color) and then there are some strange oppressive Orc like subspecies; white people. The term and its use have no cultural or phenotypical purpose; the purpose is political; to demonize a small segment of the human race as the Kulaks of planet Earth.

It might be useful to start fighting back on this term, since it’s been allowed to grow like kudzu for years, and is becoming more and more important in separating “them” from “us.” Who is “them” and who is “us” is becoming more and more important in multicultural America .

Almost three years ago a contractor for the NSA, Harold Martin was arrested for stealing classified information and possibly selling it. As The New York Times wrote at the time:

“Investigators pursuing what they believe to be the largest case of mishandling classified documents in United States history have found that the huge trove of stolen documents in the possession of a National Security Agency contractor included top-secret N.S.A. hacking tools that two months ago were offered for sale on the internet.

They have been hunting for electronic clues that could link those cybertools — computer code posted online for auction by an anonymous group calling itself the Shadow Brokers — to the home computers of the contractor, Harold T. Martin III, who was arrested in late August on charges of theft of government property and mishandling of classified information.”

I wrote about the case at the time in this post, and noted some of the oddities involved in this case:

The hacking tools were reported to have “lost” several years earlier by being inadvertently left behind on a compromised computer.

The Intercept reported that a previously unpublished draft document from the NSA (probably from the Snowden leaks) describes the tools.

In 2016, 3 years after the hacking tools are supposed to have been ‘lost,’ Harold Martin is charged with stealing and selling them.

All of that made it odd that they were looking at Martin (publicly at least) as the thief who stole and sold the hacking tools. Yet with all of the NSA’s capabilities, they couldn’t seem to find any evidence Martin had actually done that, which brings us to this week:

“…Yet none of that is likely to be mentioned at Martin’s July 17 sentencing. The hearing instead will turn on dramatically different depictions of the enigmatic Martin, a Navy veteran, longtime government contractor — most recently at Booz Allen Hamilton — and doctoral candidate at the time of his arrest.

… Martin was never charged with disclosing information and was accused only of unlawfully retaining defense information. The Shadow Brokers, which two weeks before Martin’s arrest surfaced on Twitter with the warning that it would auction off NSA hacking tools online, continued trickling out disclosures after Martin was in custody, a seeming indication that someone else may have been responsible.”

So either the government couldn’t come up with enough evidence to charge Martin with stealing and selling the hacking tools (the tools that had been lost years earlier), or it was a red herring and there was never real evidence that he was involved in the hacking tools theft in the first place.

When I wrote about this case two and a half years ago, I surmised both that Martin was innocent of selling hacking tools (but not of hoarding classified material at home-he seems guilty as hell of that) and that the Shadow Brokers were a front group possibly of the NSA itself. My theory, as I stated at the time, goes like this:

“So the information on the hacking tools is out there, even if the tools themselves are not. But there is no doubt enough technical data that would make it possible for a sophisticated intelligence service to perhaps identify and defend from those particular tools. So maybe, just maybe, the NSA wants to muddy the waters a bit by “losing” their tools, only to be found by a hacking group which then brags about having them and uses them to intrude into systems worldwide.

So…what if the tools were never lost, or stolen by Martin? What if it’s an elaborate setup to create a black hat hacking group, that can be the fall guy for failed or identified computer systems intrusions? Since the technical manual stolen by Snowden is out there, that means the useful shelf life of these hacking tools are limited, so an entirely new set of software has to be created, but that takes time. In the meantime, there is a fall guy for failed or identified computer intrusion operations, the Shadow Brokers. “

So it looks like I was right that Martin wasn’t the source of the release of the hacking tools, but to my second point, are the Shadow Brokers actually a puppet group operated by the NSA? In a world of perfect security, we would never know the answer to that. However given the absolute security bungling that the government has been guilty of, it’s possible that The Intercept may one day have a scoop on that very issue. Hopefully that won’t be for a very long time.